Transcript for:
Understanding Plant Reproduction and Flower Structure

[Music] so what we do is going to work through these different processes and we'll keep coming back to this summary to remind ourselves of how far we are on the journey of how a plant reproduces we've got gamete formation making the pollen making the eggs pollination which is how the male gamete gets the female one then fertilization when they fuse together then you make the seed in the fruit then you disperse that seed and hopefully then you get the germination and the offspring being fully produced now in order to understand this process we got a look at the anatomy of a flower and we've got to go through the different parts and and what what their roles are so first of all we'll start with the male bits now the male bits of a flower are the anther and the filament and collectively they're known as the stamen the anther is where the pollen is produced and the filament just holds that anther in in position there and there's usually quite a lot of anthers producing lots and lots of pollen we also got the petals obviously the petals are there to entice in the insects that the bees and things like that to say look over here come and get some nectar which will be down at the bottom of the flower for them to come and get and it just so happens that when they come in to get the next the nice sugary drink they rub against some of the pollen and they then will fly off to another flower and deposit that pollen there where they will deposit the pollen is on the female part of the flower and they'll deposit it at the stigma which is this the top bit there of the flower in the center stigma is connected to the ovary via the style and the ovary is where you'll find the ovules and inside the ovules is where you find the actual over the eggs and together all the female bits is called the carpel so that's where gametes have produced the pollen is producing the anther and the over are found inside the ovules so how does pollination occur then well I said either it can happen via a insect or via the wind but what has to happen is the pollen has to be transferred from the anther of one flower to the stigma of another then it would be called cross pollination occasionally you can get a self pollination flowers pollinate themselves but like I said it's not ideal so we really want to go from one flower to another now when you look at pollination you realize there's actually two types of flowers you probably never noticed the second type of flowers because they're pretty boring you would have noticed insect pollinated flowers they've got a beautiful color big petals and they produce the nice smell of the scent you probably have already noticed wind pollinated flowers you see these really on things like grasses that's because they don't have nice petals I don't have a scent they don't use insects there's no point producing them so we can compare and contrast the structures of insect pollinated flowers and wind pollinated flowers so insect pollinated flowers they've got bright petals as I said for attract insects they've got a scent they have a sticky stigma for the pollen stick to and they've got the anthers there and they're all enclosed inside that flower so the insect rubs against them they also produce nectar for the actual insects to have as their meal that's their treat for going to the flower if you look at a wind plant a flower very different no bright petals no scent no nectaries big stigma which had all kind of feathery and has to catch the pollen as it floats across in the wind also the anthers dangled down outside of the main flower so that again the wind hits them and knocks all that pollen off the pollen grains themselves are very inflated and small so they get carried by the wind and blown long distances so here's a really important table there's so many questions that come up in the IGC about the compare and contrast and these two types of flower and how they are adapted for different types of pollination you